The Best Coffee Shop Point-of-Sale Systems for Cafes
Best Coffee Shop POS System
Square Five Stars Learn More
395K Five-Star Reviews on Apple's App Store.
Top Coffee Shop 2023 Recommendations
Our Choice of The Best Coffee Shop POS Systems
Coffee shops are arguably the busiest retail businesses in your neighborhood. When you pull multiple espresso shots every few minutes, steaming milk, and serving food, everything must run smoothly to help your customers.
Speed is king for most coffee shops when running a coffee shop. Ringing up sales orders quickly is essential to maximizing your revenue. A big key in ensuring you are moving customers is a smooth running point-of-sale system.
Continue reading to check out the best POS software for coffee shops and cafes.
🏆 Skip ahead to the most popular POS System for Coffee Shops: Square POS
Learn About Our Top POS System Choices:
Square Five Stars Learn More
395K Five-Star Reviews on Apple's App Store.
What You Want From a Coffee Shop POS System
A POS system that is difficult to use has glitches or messes up transactions or fails to report out transactions reliably, which can screw up your smoothly run café.
Coffee pouring, milk steaming, and muffins being served – all can grind to a halt if your register goes down.
Aside from reliability, you want to have an easy-to-navigate interface and the ability to set up without having to think. It is tempting to believe that all POS systems are the same and you can quickly pick one out of a hat. However, quickly purchasing your POS software and POS system without some research may be costly.
I don’t want to put you to sleep with all the point-of-sale information the industry loves to put out about their systems. So, instead, I will highlight a few points you want to keep in mind before you decide, and then I will provide a few suggestions of POS systems we’ve been impressed to review.
Ease of Use
If you are running a coffee shop or have spent any time in busy cafés, you know that things can get crazy. Reliably fast and easy-to-use POS systems will make your life easier as a coffee shop owner. You will also want POS software that’s easy to teach new employees, young employees, and those with little experience ringing up customers. Most importantly, you don’t want a system where your employees are always getting stuck during transactions. A fast, clean, modern interface will move customers, reduce errors, and decrease headaches.
Contactless Payments
(Keep Customers and Employees Safer)
The pandemic has changed everything. How we shop and buy. If you could offer safe and contactless payment options, you, your employees, and your customers would touch fewer surfaces and hopefully be safer.
Inventory Management
(If You Can't Measure It, You Can't Manage It)
If you have spent time on our coffee business blog, you’ll know the importance we place on managing your coffee shop’s inventory. You can quickly move through your inventory, whether you have an extensive menu or a small limited coffee menu. Keeping track of inventory helps you avoid running out of products, keeps your workflow running smoothly, and helps you calculate your costs with ease. Waste, employee theft, or mismanagement is essential to avoid. With the POS market today, you should not have to settle for a POS system that doesn’t offer you robust inventory management or easy-to-use integrations with third-party inventory software like QuickBooks.
| Company | Feature | Next |
|---|---|---|
| Lightspeed POS | Inventory Management | Get Your Free Quote & Free Card Reader |
Square | Versatile Easy-to-Use Affordable | See Price & Features |
Shopify | Integration | Get Your Free Trial |
Reporting Quality
(Helps You Make Better Decisions)
Your coffee shop's successful management will be based on essential data you will get through your POS reports. Easy to read and accessible through an online app, it will help you know in real-time what is selling. With easy-to-read data, you will see when you sell the most products. You will be able to see which ingredients you are going through fast. Coffee shop owners love to track sales, manage remotely, and leverage available data to make better decisions and eliminate waste. Today, many top-tier POS systems come with this function. Whether you are at your coffee shop, at home with your family, or on vacation, you will be able to tell just how your coffee shop is performing.
Customer Tipping Onscreen
(Boost Revenue With Easier Tipping)
Coffee shops often survive on their gratuity to make up for the industry’s typical lower wages. Tipping your staff can be easier with credit cards. After all, who pays with cash anymore? A POS system that makes onscreen tipping easy for customers when paying with plastic or their phones encourages gratuity.
A POS interface that makes tipping easy for customers through preset percentages or fixed dollar amounts before finishing the transaction will drive up the gratuity you deserve for superb customer service. For example, you can preset your POS to display 10%, 20%, or 30% tip percentages, $1, $2, or $3 increments, and so on. Easy-to-install POS displays that rotate towards the customer and back to your barista will be needed.
Loyalty Programs
(Let's Keep Our Customers Coming Back)
Running a coffee shop in a competitive market can be fierce. By offering loyalty cards, you can entice existing customers to come back. A robust rewards program will sweeten the deal between you and your customers. POS loyalty programs are great for getting customers to come back for more.
Consider giving them free drinks or other perks for repeat business and customer loyalty. Loyalty programs can be driven by a robust POS system that allows you to connect with customers, keep points or other rewards on file, and contact them via text or email.
Employment Management
(Helps Payroll – Who Signs In and Out)
Monitoring every employee's transactions using your point-of-sale register will be necessary for accounting purposes. In addition, your POS system should help you keep track of employee hours accurately, which can save you thousands of dollars every year by doing so. Finally, having a system that can help “clock in” employees is convenient and helpful.
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Best Coffee Shop POS System
How We Determined the Best Coffee Shop POS Systems
We Rated the POS Systems on the Following Attributes:
| Factor 1 | Factor 2 | Factor 3 |
|---|---|---|
 Easy to Use | Contactless Payment | Reporting Quality |
| Inventory Management | Customer Tipping Onscreen | Loyalty Programs |
| Employee Management | Customer Service | Easy Cloud Access |
| Affordability | Easy Payment Processing | Design |
Our reviewed Coffee Shop POS systems have many essential features for owners and managers. These POS features, including excellent customer support, easy cloud access, affordable costs, and easy payment processing, should all be considered before jumping in with a particular POS system.
Some systems can include integrating with your website, ordering online, and being in sync with multiple locations.
All of these systems are essential tablet-based. You can use hardware provided by the POS company – or your iPad or other Android tablets. All of them can look modern and have a reduced footprint on your coffee bar. We have both taken the time to review these POS systems from the perspective of a small coffee shop owner and have higher-than-average ratings online.
Best Coffee Shop POS System
Top-Rated POS Systems for Coffee Shops
Our Top Coffee Shop POS System:
Square POS:
Square is among the affordable and easy-to-use POS systems for any coffee business. Square POS is versatile and easy to use whether you operate a mobile coffee truck, kiosk, or full coffee shop. Perhaps that is why it’s among the most popular among coffee shop owners.
Its simple pay-as-you-go system makes it less risky and financially intimidating. All you need is a square reader or swiper, and you're in. However, it's otherwise robust, and free software may require some add-ons.
I do like Square POS and have used it in my own coffee business. It is free to set up, but like other systems, you have to pay to process your transactions.
For example, if you sell an Americano and muffin and make the transaction with Square, you will pay 2.9% plus a 10-cent fee. Every transaction requires a percentage and a 10-cent charge as of the time of this writing.
You can get a lower fee if you invest in the hardware system, but you will still pay a small percentage and the extra ten cents.
We like Square because of its convenience and its straightforward POS software. It is easy to add and remove products, prices, and categories. Additionally, its tipping user interface makes it super easy for customers to tip at every transaction.
Its system allows real-time reporting. While it may not be as robust as others, it gives you what you want: your most popular items sold and a chart of your best hours of operation.
You can add more advanced features like ordering online, delivery, and loyalty cards. In addition, Square offers a ton of third-party integrations like DoorDash.
Square is among the most popular POS systems for coffee shops for a reason: easy to install, no contract necessary, and affordable.
Get Started with Square.
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|---|---|
Square POS Highlights:
| Recommended Coffee Shop POS: |
Top Rated POS Systems for Coffee Shops
🏆 Get Your Free Quote & POS Card Reader
Lightspeed POS is an innovative POS system for retailers, coffee shop owners, cafes, and small restaurants.
Easy to set up and navigate, Lightspeed POS makes training new employees a snap; it makes reporting your sales and inventory movements easy and processes fast, allowing you to keep that customer line moving as fast as possible.
Lightspeed POS was designed for retail business owners and moderately busy coffee shops. It really shines in a multi-location environment because everything is located in the cloud. Its 24/7 support can be important when you need guidance or help to sort out rare glitches.
What I like about Lightspeed is that it has never stopped trying to improve. As a result, it consistently offers quality features that coffee retailers need and use. For example, its inventory tracking and reporting capabilities will blow you away. In addition, its customer management features are precisely what a coffee shop owner needs – efficient, effective, and affordable.
The company is always making improvements in the software. For example, it can track your inventory movement in its mobile app – all in real-time. This POS system also integrates well with third-party accounting software systems – allowing you to manage your finances quickly.
Features that stand out are their customer service, robust improvements, and reporting on sales, inventory, and taxes, which make your life easier. You feel they are working just as hard as you are to help you with your transactions.
The Best POS System is affordable, too. Get Your Free POS Card Reader
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Shopify POS
As busy coffee shop owners, we want a seamless POS with all of our sales streams. For example, if we sell whole-bean roasted coffee online, we also want to sell at farmers' markets and our in-store cafes.
The Shopify POS system comes with the tools to manage all of your business needs online – and off. The great thing about using Shopify is that it has unified reporting that interlaces your in-store and sales online.
It has a robust reporting system and allows you to delegate individual staff to do certain things. For example, if you have two or three locations, you will know if you are out of muffins or coffee in one location and how much you have left in another.
Shopify's Mobile POS allows you to curb the long lines anywhere in your coffee shop. In addition, you can personalize your marketing and share your discounts.
Shopify is a different POS company in that it allows you to buy third-party apps that you can use to do several essential functions – from marketing to accounting, etc.
Shopify offers Shopify POS Lite, which allows in-person credit cards, mobile POS and hardware, order and product management, and customer profiles.
For a more robust POS system, Shopify offers a POS Pro plan. This plan allows, among other things, unlimited registers, staff permissions, and smart inventory management.
Get Started with Shopify.
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|---|---|
POS Highlights:
| Recommended Coffee Shop POS: |
Best Coffee Shop POS Systems
| Coffee Shop POS | Key Features | How Much? | More Info |
|---|---|---|---|
| 🏆 Lightspeed POS |
| $59 per month (Costs for hardware, plus transaction fees) | 🏆Get Your Free Quote and Card Reader |
Square |
| $0 to Setup (Costs for Hardware, Plus Percentage of transaction fees,) | Learn More to Get Started With Square |
Shopify |
| $69 per month (Costs for hardware, plus transaction fees) | Learn About Shopify |
Because Not all Coffee Shop POS Systems are the same…
Here Is Our Coffee Shop POS Recommendation:
We've taken a good look at several popular Coffee Shop POS Systems.
We've determined that while they have good qualities, that are very useful for coffee shop management. However, if one of them stands out, it is the most impressive Coffee Shop POS system. While you may have your own POS that you are leaning towards, I encourage you to visit their website as well as the others listed here.
The Best POS for Coffee Shops
Get Your Free POS Card Reader & Free Quote
Why Did We Choose Lightspeed POS?
Lightspeed Takes Better Care of Your Coffee Business
- Extensive reports help you make better financial decisions
- With just a few taps, your staff can clock in or clock out
- Perfect for multiple locations
- Integrate with accounting software
- Information can be provided in real time that you can access anywhere!
Explore the Full List of Lightspeed Features.
In other words, Lightspeed POS has everything you will need to make fast, easy transactions. This is important when you've got a long line of customers who want to get their coffee quickly and go on with their day.
I can't tell you how many lost sales (and revenue) I have seen just because the POS system was down or was too slow to process transactions. This won't happen at your coffee shop with the Best POS System.
Paying Your Taxes Is Easier
When your quarterly tax payments are due, you'll be happy you chose the best POS system. Most coffee shop businesses have to pay their taxes every quarter. As an LLC, you will have to pay your personal taxes every year too.
With its easy-to-use accounting integration, you'll be glad to have every customer transaction, business purchase, and inventory data point accessible so that you can easily pay your taxes easily and quickly. Now you can have all the data, all the time, making your life easier when tax time comes (and it comes every year!)
We think any business that will manage your money needs to provide you with excellent service. So it has made customer service its #1 priority.
We’ve heard and seen so many reviews from happy customers who believe that the value of its service is its excellent customer service.
Excellent Customer Service Matters
No doubt, when we're talking about your money and revenue, the customer service you receive from your POS system provider matters. This way, we give it the highest possible recommendation for a POS system for any coffee business: the best POS systems deliver excellent customer service.
Customer service can save you hundreds of dollars a day by ensuring that you are up and running and can process your transactions safely, securely, and without any hassle for your customers.
Customer service isn't essential, that is until you need it. Then, when you need help with your POS system, you'll be glad you chose the best POS system. It is among the most trusted, secure, and reliable POS systems – and it's affordable.
This Coffee Shop POS system has everything you will want to more efficiently and effectively manage your transactions, inventory, customer information, and employee schedules – all affordably.
Equally important, when you are taking care of customers and running a business, the last thing you want to worry about is whether your Coffee Shop POS system is working. It works just as hard as you do.
Their robust platform can help you ensure that you are also making the best decisions for your business. This would include helping you determine what products are selling and which are not. Running a coffee shop business means you need to be as efficient as possible, keep costs down, and use data to help you make decisions. It does this for you.
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Are You Ready To Get Started?
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Coffee Shop POS Systems
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* The information on this page is for educational purposes only. We do not offer legal advice.
Coffee Shop Startups
Based in Seattle, Washington, USA, Coffee Shop Startups is dedicated to providing you with the most relevant information on how to start a coffee shop business successfully. Over the last 11 years, we've helped thousands of aspiring coffee business owners worldwide. We harness the experience, wisdom, and knowledge of many successful coffee shop owners to help you increase your chances of success and profits. We support business owners who want to start a coffee business by providing them with valuable information on starting their coffee business successfully.
